


times being what they are

by shinealightonme



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Bittersweet, F/F, Fortune Telling, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, a non-Southerner attempts Southern Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 04:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17318162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: Fortunes told $5Fortunes + sympathy $100





	times being what they are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waydownhadestown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waydownhadestown/gifts).



> Written for for the TRC exchange on tumblr for ros-and-guil-are-dead/waydownhadestown, who wanted the Maura/Persephone/Calla dynamic with some Calla/Persephone romance. I hope you enjoy what I did with the characters! I really enjoyed writing it, even if it went in a direction I did not in the least expect.

Three is a good number for a lot of things: stability, strength, certainty.

It is not a good number for hitchhiking.

"The good news is there's food." Maura drops a load of plastic-wrapped snacks onto the picnic table. They've only made it forty miles today, and it's been hours since their last lift dropped them at this rest stop. If most folk don't want to take a chance on a hitchhiker, even fewer want to take that chance threefold. "The bad news is it's from a vending machine in the men's room."

"I was just thinking we needed dysentery," Calla says.

Persephone's fingers float over the table, settle on a bag of chips like she's pulling a card from the deck, _this one and no other_. She doesn't eat them, just holds the bag up and stares like there's some meaning she hasn't pulled from it yet. She doesn't look like she's really here. _Persephone_ is a name for death and life together -- summer and winter, lover or victim, stolen or runaway. It's not a name that should exist at a highway rest stop.

But then, a calla lily is a kind of flower, so that goes to show what use names are.

Calla eats without sitting down. Being a psychic is mostly a pain in the ass. She's not going to open herself to seeing every disgusting germy person who touched the table before her, not while she's eating.

Maura grabs their cardboard sign out of her bag, leaves a chocolate thumbprint while she's setting it up, just under the words:

 _Fortunes told $5_  
_Fortunes + sympathy $100_

No one had taken them up on the second offer, but it had made Maura laugh when Calla added it.

A trickle of people come through the rest stop, families and drifters and truckers. Families are useless, mothers pulling their children past before the Devil can tempt them. Drifters tend to be as broke as they are desperate for connection. But Calla likes truckers; they're superstitious and they spend their money as soon as they get it.

They've made back what Maura laid out for their synthetic dinner, and more besides, when the man approaches their table. Too well dressed to be a trucker or a drifter. Sad enough to be a husband or father, though he's alone.

"Want to know what your future holds?" Maura asks, starting up a patter that Calla is already used to. She can feel the rhythm that's taking shape.

But the man doesn't know his lines. "I'm looking for someone. My wife. She -- disappeared."

Calla _hmmm_ s, and Maura kicks her ankle under the table, _your bias in favor of disappearing women has been noted, shut up and let me make money._

"I've tried everything to find her," he says. "I'm desperate."

Calla is about ready to chase him off, but Persephone comes down to earth first.

"Of course we can help," she says. "Have a seat."

Calla frowns, but Persephone just reaches for the tarot deck, the one on her far side.

Calla passes her the deck. Their fingertips touch.

It's the same vision that Calla had the first time, climbing into the backseat of the Cadillac, shoulders bumping together and Persephone, whose name she didn't yet know, blinking at her and saying _oh, it's you_ , like she was the one who could see --

Calla drops the cards into Persephone's hand and pulls away. She isn't thinking about that yet.

Persephone doles the cards out, no patter and no performance. It isn't necessary -- Maura has already taken the five the man pulled out of his wallet -- but Calla's used to seeing psychics and fake-psychics throw some stagecraft into their work to drum up business. The faker the psychic, the more theatrics you get. It makes you wonder what you're going to hear, from a woman who doesn't dramatize at all.

She flips three cards in quick succession and stares at them.

"She's already gone," she tells the husband. "You will not see her again in this life."

He stares down at the cards like he can read the tragedy written there, which is more than _Calla_ can do. That's not the meaning she's pulling from the cards, at all. She looks up at Persephone's face and tries to read meaning there, instead. It leaves her with nothing except the idea that Persephone has told the truth, and the two ideas clash in Calla's head, refusing to get along.

"We're sorry," Maura says. The husband does look like he needs ninety-five dollars worth of sympathy. Calla should have figured Maura for a soft touch. "But it's better to know."

"No," he says. "No, you're right. It's -- better, this way," and he stands from the table like it's draining the last ounce of his strength.

He doesn't move away from the table. Calla figures he _can't_ , and that's a damn shame for him, but they aren't going to get any more customers with him looming over them like a vulture telling the world _here lies death_ , so she's about to hurry him off when he says, "Sorry, I -- I don't know what I thought I'd hear."

"There was only ever one answer," Persephone says.

He nods, and words drop out of him, like he's still thinking about something else. "Do you ladies need a ride?"

Calla doesn't like taking things from men, or going places with men, or the idea of getting into a car driven by a man who looks like he's thinking about crashing into the first tree he spots, but Maura is as pragmatic a woman as Calla has ever met.

"That'd be perfect, thank you," and she pokes Calla in the side when Calla doesn't follow along with them fast enough. Calla gets a vision of the last few nights they'd spent together: taking turns sleeping sitting upright in a booth at a truck stop diner, and then splitting a motel room with two beds.

" _I_ was who had to sleep in the chair last night," Calla hisses at her, "before you go thinking about how tired _you_ are."

"All the more reason for you to get a ride," Maura says, with not an ounce of free sympathy.

-

They don't die on the road. They get another twenty miles closer to their as-yet unknown goal, and then they pull over at the first place advertising beds for the night.

The bed and breakfast barely deserves the name. It's a ramshackle old building, half-a-dozen bedrooms that once would've housed a cheerful family and their fortune, and is lucky now to get enough travelers to keep the lights on and the water running.

The landlady gives the husband a key to one room before scrutinizing the three of them -- Calla and Maura in particular.

"I've only got the one room left," and Calla doesn't need to be psychic to know that's a lie.

"Fine. We'll take it."

She shows them to the room -- two beds, and no attached bathroom -- and counts out the money Maura gives her before she leaves.

Calla sits down on the far bed. 

"I suppose that's fair," Maura says. "Persephone, I'll flip you for the other bed."

"Take it," Persephone says. She's staring out the window, or rather, _at_ the window. It's overgrown with ivy, nothing to see through it and no light coming in, even though it's a full moon outside.

"I'm going to go see how terrible the shower is," Maura says. "I'm hoping for a clawfoot tub that doesn't work."

Calla snorts. "I'm sure if you ask the landlady'd be happy to spray you down with a hose."

Maura leaves. Persephone's still staring out the window, so Calla undresses down to just her shirt and underwear. She could use a shower herself, but she's annoyed and disgruntled, and she doesn't want to be thankful for anything she gets in this miserable old house.

The night's too hot for blankets, especially with no hope of opening the window for a cross-breeze. She strips the bed down to a single sheet and crawls under it, curls up on her side and shuts her eyes.

The lights flick off. Persephone letting her sleep, she assumes.

She assumed incorrectly, because a second later the mattress creaks and dips.

Her eyes snap open to find Persephone settling in on the bed next to her.

"What are you doing?"

"You want me here." It's not a question. Persephone is not, from what Calla has observed, an asker of questions.

It's also not wrong. Persephone is not, from what Calla has observed, _wrong_ about things. Calla can only argue with her indirectly. "I want to sleep."

"So do I." Persephone turns over in bed, her back to Calla, and scoots closer. Not close enough that they touch, but close enough that the thought is unavoidable.

Calla scowls at the back of her head. At the massive cloud of fine hair, that would only get in your eyes and mouth and nose if you tried to get close to her, which Calla doesn't want to do anyway because it's already too hot to sleep and the last thing she needs is another person's body heat.

Persephone's side rises and falls with her breath, smoothing out, drifting into the easy rhythm of sleep.

Calla inches closer, closer still, until she can put an arm around Persephone's waist.

It's the same thing she's seen every time that she's made physical contact with Persephone. The same thing that's kept her, as much as possible, from making physical contact with Persephone. She's no more ready for it than she was the first time. A vision of the future, instead of the past, unusual enough for her psychometry that it alarms Calla even before she thinks about what the vision is.

And now that she finally thinks about it, it only alarms her more. Because Persephone's future -- is Calla's future: lives entwined, bodies entwined, lips coming together lazily as they lay in a bed that Calla knows is _their_ bed, and Calla is so happy to be there that it breaks her heart.

Calla does not want to break her heart. She doesn't want that easy, warm intimacy and all of the pain-in-the-ass things it portends. Happiness doesn't just hurt you _before_ you get it.

And it isn't even a distant vision, which is all the more galling. She isn't going to put it off long. She's barely putting it off _now_ , indecisive like she never is, arm around Persephone, body tilted away, not quite lying down, not quite sitting up.

The door opens. Maura drips through a towel that is much too small to be the only thing she's wearing, her hair tied on top of her head to keep it dry.

Enough light slips in from the hallway to illuminate the room. Maura meets Calla's eyes, looks down to Persephone, looks back up and raises an eyebrow in a question: _oh?_

Calla shrugs.

" _Nice,_ " Maura whispers, and gives Calla a thumbs up.

Calla scowls and turns over, faces away from both of them as she shuts her eyes and lies down to sleep.

-

Persephone is gone the next morning.

Calla doesn't care that she's gone. It wasn't like she _asked_ Persephone to sleep with her. She wasn't counting on her being there when she woke up.

Maura takes several shoves to get out of bed, and then she stretches extravagantly while Calla gets more and more impatient.

"Let's go see if the breakfast at this bed and breakfast is any better than the bed," Maura says, after she's sufficiently woken up or annoyed Calla, either of which could have been her real goal.

"Wouldn't count on it."

They get to the foot of the stairs before Calla sees the landlady. She's talking to a man in uniform, and Calla instinctively turns for the front door, but Maura is ahead of her and has already stepped into the dining room. Calla's not even sure she _sees_ the sheriff; her eyes are locked on the coffee pot on the table, and it's drawing her in like a sailor to a Siren.

"These are the ones," the landlady says, cementing her place on Calla's shit list.

"I want to ask you ladies some questions," the sheriff says.

Calla's thrumming all over, with the knowledge that something's wrong, with the knowledge that Persephone was gone this morning and wasn't, as she'd been letting herself hope, waiting for them downstairs. "So ask."

Maura shoots her a scathing look and turns to the sheriff, her face switching over to a friendly smile quick as a wink. "Sorry 'bout that, my friend gets grumpy when she doesn't sleep well. How can we help?"

The sheriff isn't impressed with her charm. "I think it'd be better if we talk in my office."

"That so?" Maura's not dumb, and she's not pretending to be, either. "Is that a request or an order?"

"How 'bout you ladies say yes and we don't have to find out."

Calla can't be too worried about Persephone, because she knows that in the near future Persephone can't be dead or in jail, because she'll be -- elsewhere. But it eats at her, while the sheriff drives them in silence, that she doesn't know what this is about. The whole damn point of being psychic is not having to deal with not knowing what things are about.

The sheriff puts them in his office -- an actual office, not an interrogation room like on TV, either because they aren't under arrest, or more likely because this dingy backwater station doesn't have one. He leaves the door open while he talks to someone down the hall, leaves them visible to anyone who happens to look over.

"Where'd she get to?" Maura does not have to specify who _she_ is.

"No idea." Calla hates it. She knows that Maura is in the chair next to her, could sense her there even if she couldn't see her or hear her, but she can't feel anything from Persephone. It's like not knowing where one of her feet is; she's spread too wide, off balance.

Maura sighs. "Just when we could've used a white woman."

Calla looks down the hall to be sure no one is coming, and then she gets up from her chair and starts poking around the office. She grimaces at most of what she sees, but keeps going anyway, touching more items, learning more things. If she doesn't get to know what they're here for or where Persephone got to, maybe she can at least find out _something_ useful.

She sits down when she hears a step in the hall, a moment before the sheriff walks in.

"Thank you for your patience, ladies, I hope this won't take too long." He doesn't sound either sorry or like he really cares how long he keeps them. "Can either of you tell me, do you know who this is?" and he puts down --

A picture of yesterday's sad sack husband. Calla wasn't expecting that. She'd written him off the moment he'd stopped being useful.

"We met him yesterday," Maura says. "Didn't get his name."

"How'd you meet him?"

"At a rest stop."

"And where was that, roundabout?"

Maura stops like she's thinking about it. "Twenty miles out of town, give or take."

She's good at this; answers the questions as they're asked and nothing more. The sheriff keeps looking over at Calla like he's waiting for her to jump in and offer more information, for free.

Calla doesn't give things away for free. The sheriff stops looking.

"You arrived at the bed and breakfast together last night," he says to Maura.

That one's not even a question; she just nods.

"You got a ride from him?"

"He offered us a ride."

"Just like that?"

Maura nods again.

"He didn't ask you for anything in exchange?"

For fuck's sake, he thinks they're prostitutes, and Maura's on the same page as Calla, because she cheerfully tells the sheriff, "oh, that was just a favor. He'd already paid us for our services."

It's Calla's turn to kick Maura, but she doesn't dare. She's having a hard enough time as it is not laughing or glaring. If she moves an inch she's going to do at least one of those.

The sheriff's eyes widen. "Your services?"

"We're psychics."

His face drops. He'd been all set to arrest a couple of hookers, all right. "So you told him his fortune, read his palm, is that what you're saying?"

"No," Maura says. "He had a question he wanted answered."

"Miss, you're wearing my patience thin enough already." The manufactured courtesy drops right out of his voice. He's going for authority, censure, righteousness. It's a tone Calla's heard enough times it only bores her. "I don't like charlatans and devil worshipers round here, and I'm not interested in spinning this out into some fancy tale."

"What are you interested in?" Calla asks.

His eyes twitch over, like he forgot she was there.

"You ever met this man before?"

"No."

"You see him again once you were at the B&B?"

"No."

"You didn't go into his room?"

Maura strikes an offended expression that would've landed better if they hadn't already convinced the sheriff they were devil worshipers and possibly ladies of the night besides. "Of course not!"

"What happened to him?" Calla's voice rises. If this doesn't have anything to do with Persephone, it's a relief, and it's also a _waste of time_.

The sheriff thinks it over before deigning to answer her question. "He's dead. Landlady found him this morning when he didn't answer his wake up call."

Calla thinks first _we didn't get offered any wake up call,_ and only secondly, _dead. Huh._

"We didn't hear anything last night," Maura says. "But we'd be happy to help. We could hold a seance to contact his spirit."

The sheriff points at her and raises his voice, which is the moment where Calla decides she's done with him. "Listen here, you, we don't need con artists coming through scamming honest hardworking people -- "

Calla cuts him off. "You should be more worried about your wife sleeping with your deputy."

Maura rolls her eyes, indistinguishable from all the little old church ladies Calla's ever seen asking the Lord to give them strength.

The sheriff is too shocked to be angry, at her audacity if nothing else. "What did you say?"

"Ask him why he missed his shift last month, the day you had your meeting with Judge Mitchell." She stares hard enough to let the sheriff know that she knows what happened at the meeting with Judge Mitchell, the money that happened to go missing and the verdict that happened to drop.

He opens his mouth and closes it several times without getting any words out, which is the least that today owes Calla. "What are you -- who told you -- " He stands up, his chair teetering before it rights itself. "We're done here. Don't skip town," and he shoves them out the office ahead of him.

"I was trying to be subtle," Maura says once they're out in the sunlight.

"Subtlety's a waste of time."

"In that case, we might as well get our stuff and find Persephone so we can skip town."

They have to walk across town to get back to the bed and breakfast, which even in a town this size takes time, and when they get there Calla has a confused second where she thinks they've gone to the wrong spot.

"Is it just me," Maura asks, "or does this place look creepier, in the daylight?"

"You also look creepier in the daylight," Calla says, but she has to force the joke, and as soon as it's out it slides away, like it knows it isn't welcome here.

The house hasn't changed since the night before, not in any material way. The windows had been covered up and the paint peeling the first time they'd seen it. The effect then had been to make it look tired.

It wasn't tired. It was waiting.

Maura walks up the stairs to the porch. There's no creak of old wood under her feet, like the house has gotten stronger since last night.

She puts a hand on the door and it swings open.

"Don't," Calla says. "We can ditch the stuff."

Maura steps inside.

"What are you _doing_?" Calla hisses at her, walking up the stairs against her own better judgment.

"More bad decisions." Maura starts off down the foyer, her words getting louder. It amplifies how little sound there is from anything else. "Come on, it doesn't want _us._ "

Calla steps inside.

She can feel instantly what Maura means: the house is hungry for something, but they're not what it's looking for. But it's minding them all the same, and Calla doesn't trust hunger. Enough desperation and you'll settle for what you can get.

They make it upstairs without hearing so much as a whisper. Big drafty building like this, sound ought to carry. The landlady must be gone, if she isn't _gone_ , and Calla doesn't spend much time worrying about which it is.

Maura walks down the hall, not sneaking but not rushing either, telling the house it has no effect on her. Calla lets her set the pace, because that's as good a tactic as any for _not getting eaten by a house_ , but she stomps her feet more, just to let the house know it's irritating her.

Maura passes the dead man's room and keeps going.

Calla means to follow, she does, but her sense of curiosity has always been as morbid as everything else about her, and she stops to take a look.

The body's gone. Of course the body's gone. There's nothing else of note; it's an ordinary room.

We brought him here, she thinks. We brought him here to die.

"He brought _himself_ here," she snaps. "He was driving."

Only because you wanted a ride. Only because you killed all his hope. Only because you told him he'd lost the thing he was looking for -- 

"He asked a question and we answered it," Calla says. "If you're _trying_ to make me feel sorry for something you're going to have to work a lot harder than that. I'm not in the habit of feeling bad for white men who feel sorry for themselves and then _give up_."

The house waits. Calla has the impression it is not used to people talking back when it tries to poison their minds. At least she has that much control, whatever good it does. It wasn't enough to stop her from losing track of Persephone --

"All right, now you've really pissed me off," she says, and she reaches her fingers out to touch the wall.

The hunger is so much _stronger_ than she knew. She'd felt it enough to be wary of it, but there had still been that little bit of doubt, _the house couldn't really have eaten someone_. There's no more doubt. She can see exactly how it happened, their driver lying in bed, his sadness, his loneliness, but more than that, his _regret_. How the house had told him, _yes, your fault, you did this, don't you deserve it, don't you deserve to die._ How it fed on him until there was nothing left, not even enough to keep a heart beating, the smallest amount of work a human can do. How it feeds on the landlady, a little every night, killing her much more slowly. How it had fed on travelers before that, stolen them away in pieces or whole, trying to fill up its hunger and silence its own regret.

She pulls her hand away. She doesn't need to chase the hunger any farther. Every building in the South has a sad story to tell, its own bones in the soil and ghosts in the attic. She doesn't need to hear what excuses this one has.

"You're not special," she tells it in disgust, and then she walks down the hall to where she had seen the house watching Persephone.

She'd gotten up and walked to the bathroom, still half-dressed the way she'd been the night before, under Calla's arm. Calla can't tell whether she just got up in the night, planning on coming back to bed, or whether she'd woken up that morning with the intention of going about her day.

Neither of those had happened, because at some point she'd looked in the mirror.

Calla can't even hear her breathing. She's perfectly still. No one should be that still, least of all when they've been standing for hours.

 _You left her here,_ the house tries, rather weakly, to get under Calla's skin again. She ignores it.

Carefully -- making sure her own eyes don't so much as glance at the mirror -- Calla takes a hold of Persephone's wrists and pulls her out into the hallway. There's no vision this time, no glimpse into that happy-warm-safe bed, just the hunger bleeding off the house, meeting something so strange and strong and sad that even it didn't dare to try to feed on it.

"Persephone," Calla says. It doesn't sound right. Names ought to have power; but she already knew that this one doesn't, quite. "Persephone."

The house is utterly silently.

"Dammit," and before she can talk herself out of it or fume about the sheer fairy tale idiocy of everything, she cups Persephone's face in one hand and kisses her.

Persephone's lips are icy, the only cold thing in West Virginia, and Calla has a terrifying moment where she thinks, all on her own, _I'm kissing a corpse_.

But she isn't. Because there's a future where she kisses Persephone again, with no terror and no chill, without even nerves or surprise because she knows in her bones that that's her place. She's already seen that future, and she's going to get there, whatever it takes.

"Oh," Persephone says, the sound muffled against her lips, her body stirring to life, and then she kisses Calla back.

Calla lets that last for a heartbeat, two, three, and then she pulls away. Persephone's eyes are bright, and focused solely on Calla's face.

"I see I missed something," Persephone says.

"You went away." It's almost a question.

"I do that sometimes." It's almost an answer.

Maura tromps back down the hallway toward them. " _There_ you are, Calla," like _she_ wasn't the one who went on ahead. She's carrying all three of their bags, and a pillow case full of something that clanks.

"Are you stealing the silverware?" Calla demands.

"Compensation for our troubles."

"You're a fallen woman from a bad novel."

Maura grins, the only bit of light in the whole house, and Calla grabs Persephone and pulls her toward it.

-

"Where you ladies headed?" the driver asks.

They've been giving vague answers the last three days -- _east, wherever you're going, as far as you can take us_ \-- but this time Persephone says "west, about fifteen miles." Her first words since they left the house and started walking out of town, and the wrong direction, besides. Maura glances at Calla while the driver tells them to get in. Calla shrugs.

Persephone gives the driver more directions as they get closer, aiming somewhere in particular; takes them off the interstate and down dusty roads until they roll into what's left of a one-horse town after the horse gets shipped to the glue factory.

They thank the driver and get out. Persephone leads them down Main Street, such as it is, and into a dingy diner. That's the end of her inspiration, though; she sits down in the first empty booth and gives no sign of going anywhere.

Maura pulls out the cardboard sign. They pass some time reading fortunes for a bunch of teenagers who are obviously just daring each other to _go talk to the witch women_ , but that's fine; skeptical money spends the same as any other. Calla even finds some joy in telling a girl that no, her dipshit boyfriend isn't the love of her life, and when the girl's face falls she pulls another card, would you look at that, you'll find another love somewhere.

"You're going to send us to the poor house if you keep handing out free sympathy like that," Maura mutters under her breath.

"Are you accusing me of being the nice one?"

"Well, _I'm_ not the nice one," Maura says. "I'm a fallen woman from a bad novel, remember? Maybe Persephone's the nice one."

Persephone sits up straight just then. Calla thinks it's hearing her name that does it, but then she follows Persephone's eyes. She's staring at a woman who just walked in, is watching intently as she walks behind the counter, dons an apron and picks up a pad, clearly a waitress coming on shift.

Calla shifts in the booth, not closer to Persephone, not further away, just -- fidgeting, uselessly, like _she's_ the heartbroken teenager, and she makes herself knock it off.

The waitress approaches their table, where they've been nursing the same three cups of coffee for an hour. Before she can ask for their order or kick them out Persephone looks her straight in the eye and says "your husband's dead."

The waitress blanches. There's nothing convincing in her voice when she says, "I don't know what you mean, I -- I don't have a husband."

"Not anymore," Persephone says.

The waitress flinches again, brushes her hands down her apron like that will brush all the rest of it off of her too. "I'm sorry, I've got other tables," but she doesn't even get two steps away before she comes back, her voice little more than a croak. "He's really gone?"

"Yes."

The waitress shuts her eyes. Her throat works a few times, and in the end, she still can't get a sound out, just mouths the words _thank you_ and heads for the kitchen, out of sight.

Persephone sips her coffee.

Maura and Calla lock eyes. Calla watches Maura put together the same pieces she is: the client Calla hadn't wanted and Persephone took anyway, the reading that hadn't matched the cards, the way they just happened to spend the night in a house with a presence dwelling in it -- 

"Okay," Maura says. "Persephone's not the nice one."

"Niceness is irrelevant anyway," Persephone says. "The traditional roles are maiden, mother, crone."

"You're not sticking me with _any_ of those titles," Maura says, and Calla snorts in agreement.

-

Maura leaves the table shortly after, charmed away by a man who was only getting his fortune read as an excuse to chat with her.

"He's a bit _obvious,_ isn't he?" Calla whispers as she gets up. He's already holding her hand like a suitor at a princess's ball.

"Subtlety's a waste of time," Maura says merrily, and skips off, over to a booth in the corner of the room.

Calla keeps half an eye on her, habit when a friend wanders off with an unknown man, but it's hardly necessary. Maura hasn't gone far, her laugh still audible from the other side of the room, but more than that Calla can _sense_ her, like she could reach Maura if she had to.

Persephone says, "we lose her some day."

Calla looks over.

"There's a man involved," Persephone continues. "And a child."

Calla is used to losing women she cares about to men and children, or at least to the idea of men and children. " _That'll_ be new."

"You aren't going to lose me to those," Persephone says. "It'll be something else."

Calla has seen futures and pasts since before she understood the flow of time. She was lifting people's secrets off them before she was old enough to know she should keep her mouth shut for her own good. But this...this is something else.

"How much do you know?"

Persephone stares after Maura for another beat, and when she looks at Calla, the only answer she gives is a smile. Honest silence, and Calla never does want a comforting lie, but she feels a stab of sympathy now for all the people who do.

There's an absolute certainty in that statement, that she is going to lose Persephone. But there's an absolute certainty, too, that she's going to have her first. Summer and winter in equal measure: is the girl stolen or does she run away, and does it matter, in the end.

Calla takes her hand and feels that kiss that hasn't happened yet, and the one that has, and everything in between, steady and sure.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this story you can [reblog it on tumblr](http://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/181759385680/times-being-what-they-are-shinealightonme).


End file.
